The main obstacles to my running as loosely and freely as I would like are the heat, humidity and my balky back. If I want to continue to run outdoors, which I prefer, I will have to deal with the heat and humidity. My back? IÃ‚Â’ve tried stretching, strengthening my core, limiting the distances that I run, all in an attempt to allow me to continue lacing up my running shoes and going. Then an old friend of mine in town this past weekend suggested Bikram yoga, which is yoga performed under hot conditions.

I do Bikram yoga, and between postures we go into a position that the teacher says means our hearts have the least possible amount of work to do: lying on our backs, heels together and feet flopping apart, arms close to the body, palms up. Are the teachers correct? When you are horizontal, your heart doesn't have to pump the blood upwards to your brain, and your venous return from your lower body doesn't have to be forced upwards against gravity. So, simply from a mechanical viewpoint, this is the position in which your heart has the least work to do.

When it comes to yoga, some like it hot but not too hot. So yoga studios and fitness centres are finessing the tenets of hot yoga as set forth by the master, to find the middle way. "Some people are turned off by the heat, some people are addicted straight off the bat," said Brooke Eddey, a hot yoga instructor at Crunch, the national chain of fitness centres. "Our room is around 90 degrees (.

I have been attending Bikram yoga classes for nine years. Bikram (90 minutes, 26 poses in a 105-degree room) is so strenuous and demands so much focus that I stop thinking about anything else. The result: I am treated to a vacation from my head. I also know that after class, I am calmer, nicer and less reactive for the rest of the day. As an added bonus, there are many lessons from yoga that anyone can apply to life. 1) Breathing is mandatory. OK, I know this sounds stupid because we all breathe, but we don't breathe deeply (inhale and exhale to a count of six).

What kind of yoga do you do? The stretchy kind? The one where you breathe a lot? Move a lot? Rest a lot? If you don’t know, no worries. It’s common. There are so many styles of yoga out there, I thought it would be helpful to go over some. You can identify what might appeal most to you. If you attend a class and it doesn’t resonate with you, I encourage you to sample a few more. Yoga did not stick to me the first few times I tried it. It might have been that the class was a little slow, which didn’t mesh well with my (then) Type-A exercise personality of killing myself with cardio.

"Blue zones" describe a handful of longevity hot spots around the world, where people commonly live active and healthy lives past the age of 100. With a lifespan 10 years longer than the average American, the typical Blue Zone dweller survives into his/her twilight years relatively unscathed by cancer, heart disease and dementia. Just as remarkably, these sprightly centenarians don't just stagger over the 100-year mark, they charge heartily through the other side, plowing through the winter of life with verve, a bag of homespun rock salt, and a determination to manifest the spring.